More than 100 journalists massed here in Kirov, about 560 miles northeast of Moscow, many traveling with Mr. Navalny and his supporters overnight for more than 12 hours by train. But the court proceedings they had come to watch were finished in just about an hour as the judge, Sergei V. Blinov, granted a one-week adjournment to give Mr. Navalny’s lawyers more time to prepare their defense.
His lawyers had requested a monthlong postponement, and also urged that the trial be held in Moscow, where Mr. Navalny lives.
A lawyer for Mr. Navalny, Olga Mikhailova, said the postponement would allow time for a regional court to issue a ruling, expected early next week, on a complaint by Mr. Navalny that the authorities had mishandled his case.
Mr. Navalny rose to fame by crusading against official corruption with tart-tongued blog posts and a flair for turning phrases. By far the most memorable of these was his branding of United Russia, the party that nominated Vladimir V. Putin for president, as the “party of swindlers and thieves” — an expression now so permanently fixed in the Russian political lexicon that it appears among the top results of a Google search for the party’s real name.
Mr. Navalny, 36, is charged with embezzling $500,000 from a state-controlled timber company here while working as an adviser to the regional governor in 2009.
Prosecutors had scrutinized the case and previously dismissed it, but federal officials revived it after Mr. Navalny became the most prominent leader of the huge street protests in Moscow that followed Russia’s disputed parliamentary elections in December 2011.
Although others who have challenged Mr. Putin have faced prosecution, most notably the Yukos oil tycoon, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, who remains in prison, the case against Mr. Navalny is the first in post-Soviet Russia against such a high-profile political leader.
Emerging from the courtroom after the brief proceedings, Mr. Navalny repeated his claims of innocence. Having made a trademark of publishing documentary evidence of official corruption on the Internet, he noted that he had similarly posted all of the documentary materials related to his case, which he said proved the embezzlement charges baseless.
“I am not going to say banal, routine phrases that the case is fabricated, falsified and I am fully innocent,” Mr. Navalny said. “Since I posted all the material of the case, any person, even without a judicial education, can be sure of it.” He added, “I am sure that in the course of the hearings my innocence will be fully proved.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/europe/trial-of-putin-nemesis-is-delayed-for-a-week.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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